Abbey's Road: Feeling emotional over emojis

A few weeks ago Bookworm and The Architect returned from a shopping trip with Someone Who Is Not Me and were in the process of showing off their new duds when I stopped Bookworm mid-sentence.

“What is THIS?” I asked, holding up a new pair of underwear that bore an image of a slice of pizza next to the words “Pizza is my boyfriend.”

“I have a problem with this. No, I have fifteen problems with this. Do you want to hear them?”

She just stared at me. “They’re emoji underwear,” she said.

“I don’t care. This is the dumbest pair of underwear I’ve ever seen,” I continued. (This was before I came across the pair with the smiling rainbow-colored unicorn excrement.) “This is what is wrong with America. One faction is pushing McDonald’s to advertise that its Big Mac has enough calories to last a person three days while another is printing underwear purporting to express an eight-year-old’s undying affection for extra cheese and pepperoni.”

I may not have used those exact words.

But seriously, America.

First off, Bookworm falls in the gap between when underwear needs to have licensed cartoon characters in order to entice a toddler to potty train and when she gets married at the age of 30. In between, there is no need for underwear to be anything but functional. So why bother with the waste of screen printing? Also, just go with gray. It’s hard to mess up gray in the laundry. (But if you do, it doesn’t matter. Because the point of UNDERwear is that no one sees it. Ya read me?)

Let’s move on to “Pizza is my boyfriend.”

Ha ha, I understand that you’re all sassy and you’d rather spend time with a slice of Meat Lovers than a loud, smelly, scuffling, obnoxious boy. I don’t blame you. But you’re eight years old. Why do we even need to talk about boyfriends? Aren’t unicorns a big deal right now? Why not stick with those? Believe me, you’ll have plenty of time to worry about boyfriends, but you only have one more year of the single digits. Better embrace it, sister.

If I do a Google search for “Pizza is my boyfriend,” I get more than 18 million hits: T-shirts. Watches. Phone cases. Lunch boxes. And not just for the tween set.

When I do a Google search for “Pizza is my girlfriend,” the top images are of a bearded guy sitting a) across the table from, b) on a couch next to, and c) in bed with an actual box of pizza. At least he’s being real.

In other words, a girl is supposed to wear undies, carry a lunchbox and hang up a poster declaring her affinity for Sbarro while her male counterparts shrug and leave her to contribute to the nation’s obesity epidemic while they work on perfecting layups?

Not OK, America. Not OK.

I know I’m reading too much into this situation, but it doesn’t make me any less embarrassed to be a part of a society that gets a chuckle out of the rainbow-colored excrement of a fantastical creature with a horn sticking out of its forehead. Can’t it just be soft-serve ice cream? Never mind, don’t answer that.

I let her keep the underwear because our washing machine tends to gobble them up, along with socks and hair ties. But if they accidentally get washed with a sticker over the pizza, well...it’s not like anyone will know.

Abbey Roy is a mom of three girls who make every day an adventure. She writes to maintain her sanity. You can probably reach her at amroy@nncogannett.com, but responses are structured around bedtimes and weekends.